Terrorism by the Numbers in Spain
Most Spaniards gave a wary welcome to last October’s announcement by the Spanish Basque terror group ETA that it has decided to “definitively cease its armed activity” — though polls suggest that as many as 70% doubt it is for real. Nor do they appear to be buying into the stipulation that what should come next are political negotiations in which there are “no victors, and no vanquished.” The last part is easy, though. There never were any. Just murderers and their victims.
Who could object to totaling up accounts before the books are closed by a probably inevitable, Ulster-style amnesty? Let’s do that — and start by deciding how many people have been murdered by ETA since it was formed in 1959 to establish a racially-exclusionary homeland in which the Basque people could defend the purity of their bloodlines, speak their peculiar language, and exalt other fetishes of their collective cultural identity.
El País, Spain’s largest-circulation daily, puts the number of victims at 829 and most foreign media, including the Associated Press and Agence France Presse, copy; but the second-ranked paper, El Mundo, says it’s 864. Meanwhile, the centennial tabloid ABC holds ETA responsible for 856 deaths, while the principal victims’ associations and radio talk jocks will often claim 857 or 858. How to account for such disparity? One reason is that the lower numbers exclude those killed by a splinter group that broke away from ETA in 1978 and remained active until 1984.
The turgidly-named Comandos Autónomos Anticapitalistas rejected ETA’s Soviet-inspired “democratic centrism” that reserved all authority to a handful of individuals at the top. They demanded “autonomy” for hit teams to choose their own victims and this did not sit at all well with the ringleaders, who were control freaks as well as Stalinists, and jealous of their prerogative to decide who lives and who dies.
That being the case, can it be sustained that those 20-30 unaccounted-for victims — a prominent Socialist senator included — were, in fact, killed by ETA, even though ETA’s own leaders had no hand in marking them for death? But you also have to consider that the faction’s surviving members were eventually reincorporated into the parent organization, where they carried on killing — only this time under orders.
Borderline cases muddle the victim audits. When Luis Allende, a well-to-do Bilbao dentist, died of cancer a year after being kidnapped for ransom, a judge deciding the insurance claim ruled that the “violent stress” he experienced during his ten-day ordeal caused the cancer. And what about the Civil Guard sergeant struck and killed by an ambulance while helping to evacuate the wounded from the 1991 car bomb massacre at Vic, near Barcelona? Does that get filed under terrorism or traffic accidents? (In both instances, the Spanish government said terrorism and green-lighted compensation.) Official victim status was likewise conceded to Emilia Larrea, a housewife in the ETA stronghold of Mondragón. She was chatting with a neighbor when she took a bullet in the firefight that erupted on the street between five heavily armed ETA hitmen and the Civil Guards in hot pursuit of them.
Another reason for the numerical discrepancy arises from ETA’s practice of publicly crowing over its murders — but not quite all of them. In fact, the gang never quite got around to acknowledging its very first killing. Their reticence may be due to the fact that Begoña Urroz Ibarrola was two months short of her second birthday in June 1960, when the incendiary bomb went off in San Sebastian’s Amara train station, while her mother was working the checked baggage counter. One night of agonizing pain was required for life to ebb from Begoña’s tiny, charred body, but it took 51 years for Spanish authorities to acknowledge her victim status. ETA has yet to follow suit.
Nor has the group ever commented on the bomb that claimed 14 lives in a Madrid cafeteria in September 1974 — the “calle del Correo” atrocity. A next-door police station may have led the killers to imagine they were striking a heroic blow against the oppressor, but all they got for their trouble was a single officer who succumbed to his wounds two years after the attack, in addition to a shrapnel-shredded telephone operator, a schoolteacher, a neighborhood bakery owner, and office workers on their coffee break when the building fell in on top of them.
Giles Tremlett, the author of Ghosts of Spain, rounds off to “more than twenty” the tally of murdered children, many of whom were killed either with, or in the presence of their parents. The father of two-year-old Luis Delgado happened to be driving past Civil Guard main headquarters in Madrid at the moment the bomb went off. Nor has ETA shown the slightest scruple about killing parents in front of their children. Off-duty police officer Julio César Sánchez had just picked up his four kids from school when they gunned him down at the schoolyard gate. Dolores González Cataraín, alias “Yoyes,” once a senior ideologue of the terror group, accepted a government amnesty offer. In September 1986 she was out walking with her three-year-old son when the designated assassin came up to them, announced “I’ve come from ETA and I’m here to execute you,” and pumped three rounds into her.
Begoña was just one more child who will never have to pay adult bus fares thanks to ETA; making for a total of 23, if one counts the near-term fetus carried by one of the 21 shoppers slaughtered in the car bomb massacre at the Hipercor shopping center in Barcelona in June 1987. Two pairs of young siblings, including four-year-old twins, were among the victims of that ambitious exercise in collective bloodletting, as were various housewives, an architect, and the captain of a women’s soccer team. For good measure, a baby born three months after the attack to one of the survivors was deaf-mute on arrival.
A tally of underage victims inevitably leads to the December 1987 massacre at the Civil Guard residential barracks at Zaragoza that claimed the lives of five schoolgirls, aged three to eleven, in addition to a seventeen-year-old boy and five adults. A sculptural group representing children at play with a crouching dog now commemorates the open ground where the barracks used to stand. It has been fixed up with shrubbery and renamed “Hope Park,” but for many, a more eloquent statement of what happened there comes just from the fact that no matter how hard they try to make it a place for recreation, it remains a vacant lot, an empty space.
Excellent and powerfully written article, but I can’t help thinking that, had there been a self-styled Basque constituency of any size in New York or Massachusetts, these last decades, you could have been putting a 3, 4, or 5 in front of the total of lives wasted.
I don’t think “negotiations” with the ETA will solve anything. You’re dealing with people here on both sides of the equation where a murder becomes a generations-long blood feud. A piece of paper or a simple declaration isn’t ever going to end that. Too much blood has been spilled and memories are very, very, long in that part of the world. I don’t really expect much to change, especially now that the conservatives are back in power in Spain.
SOPA Mark-up Delayed as Support Continues to Crumble December 16, 2011 – by Donny Shaw
After day one of the House Judiciary Committee’s mark-up of the Stop Online Piracy Act (a.k.a. SOPA), it’s pretty clear that the bill is going to be passed by the committee and forwarded to the full House. So far every single amendment to improve the bill for its critics has been rejected, with a solid, bipartisan majority voting en bloc to keep the bill as is. But day one of the mark-up has also made it clear that the public is waking up and legislators are taking notice.
While I have no love for terrorism, why is it any different when a government attempts to assassinate or kill people and misses, accidentally hitting civilians? Our campaign of targeted strikes has surely killed more than 361 civilians in the last ten years.
I guess my point is, there isn’t a distinction between attacks that are only aimed at civilians (such as their blowing up of hotels) and ones aimed at government or paramilitary forces (aka police) – it’s all called “terrorism”, yet it’s really only the former that should be called it.
ETA murders anyone who resists their political demands. They murder random people for not supporting their political demands (i.e. by visiting Spain as tourists). They initiated the violence, not the Spanish people. They started the violence because they could not pursue their goals through peaceful political means. There is a case to be made that this was justified during the Franco dictatorship. However, as SNL used to say, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, and has been for thirty-six years. Since then, Basque activists have been free to campaign for their goals. But there is no democratic majority for what ETA wants. So they kill for it.
US drone strikes kill people who have murdered Americans and actively work to murder more Americans, and anyone else who opposes them. We use drone strikes because it is impossible to go in on the ground and lay hands on these people. They initiated the violence, not us. Our only condition for peace is that they stop trying to murder Americans (and our allies) and those who have murdered Americans surrender.
That’s the difference.
One need not like ETA to sympathize with the Basques. But I suppose their language should be suppressed since it is “peculiar.”
Off Topic: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died Saturday on a train trip, a tearful state television announcer, dressed in black, reported Monday. The announcer said that the 69-year old had died of physical and mental over-work on his way to give “field guidance.”
It doesn’t change much about the ETA’s horrendous list of murders, but there is something wrong about at least one of the victims given above.
I’ve been wondering about the young Danish woman, Dorothy Fertig. Her name, neither part, is particularly Danish. The first, “Dorothy”, is so rare as to be non-existent (it’s hard to say in Danish, could it be “Dorte”?). Although it’s not uncommon to find German surnames in Denmark, the surname, “Fertig” is also very uncommon and more likely German. On top of that I can’t find any reference to the young lady in any searches I made apart from this article and in libertaddigital.com – both have Spanish sources. I found nothing about her in any Danish media (I read Danish).
You were right to raise an eyebrow here. She was named as “Dorothy Fertig” in all contemporary news reports I have seen but ABC identified her as German and La Vanguardia as Danish (both papers have their archives online). “Fertig” has been perpetuated down to the present day in over a dozen sources of variable reliability, as is evident from a quickie Google search, but I agree with you, it doesn’t sound quite right for Denmark, though there are numerous Americans with that surname.
Google will give you just as many hits for “Dorothy/Dorothea Fertz” and I suspect this must be correct. As to her nationality, sources are pretty much evenly split between “alemana” and “danesa”, with the Asociación de Víctimas del Terrorismo listing her as German/Fertz and Vidas Rotas as Danish/Fertig. But the variant surnames do not always coincide with a one or another alleged nationality. I assumed that the confusion arose from reports that “Dorothy” was travelling with a German girl who was injured in the blast that killed her companion.
The young woman in question does indeed figure Libertad Digital’s rolling memorial of ETA victims, see…
http://blogs.libertaddigital.com/in-memoriam/archivo-2011-07.html
as “Fertig” and “Danish” but there is no photograph of her there, or anywhere else that I have examined. The Wikipedia entry on post-Franco ETA victims tags her, uniquely, as “Czech (or Danish)” Howso “or”?
This has stirred my curiosity, too, and I have queried the Interior Ministry, though I don’t expect to hear back until after the holidays. Will post here when I know something.
Begoña Urroz was killed by the DRIL (Liberation Revolutionary Iberian Directorate). That explains ETA’s reticence: that group was not responsible for that bombing on 27 June 1960. Emilia Larrea was killed by mistake in 1978 by a group of civil guards that some time before had chased after 3 Comandos Autónomos Anticapitalistas terrorists (and they have killed 2 and wounded and captured the other). All the webs that describe how ETA members kill Emilia larrea are lying, either willingly or unwillingly.There was no danger for the civil guards when they opened fire once again, killing that housewife. No “hot pursuit” at all.There’s another case of official lie: postman José Antonio Cardosa was not killed by ETA in 1989. It was the dirty war. Cabman Martín Merquelanz’s killing was claimed by the far-right Batallón Vasco Español in 1978. Notwithstanding this, he’s considered a ETA victim.
The foreign girl Dorothea Fertig was not killed by ETA “military” (1974-2011?), but by ETA “political-military” (1974-82). Thew so-called polimilis were pardoned (scotch-free) in 1982 when they renounced to violence and dismantled their terrorist organization. Their political party was EE (Euskadiko Ezkerra), that since the early 1990s is part of PSOE, Zapatero’s party. Full circle. The Basque PSOE is called PSE-EE. I don’t believe the Spanish authorities be interested in investigating the bombings by ETA p-m in Madrid on 29 Jule 1979. 7 people killed and over 100 wounded.
I happened to edit the Spanish Wikipedia’s article on people killed by ETA from November 1975 onwards, so I’m afraid that I’m responsible for typing down “or Danish”. Sources are at variance regarding Dorothea Fertig. According to the book “Vidas rotas” (Broken Lives) she was Danish. According to other sources, she was Czech. According to the Spanish press in 1979, she could have been German. Summing up: no one seems to be sure about her nationality or about how to spell her name.